WASHINGTON _ Amid widespread confusion within his administration, President Donald Trump is expected Thursday to once again address the issue of putting a question about citizenship on the 2020 census.
Trump has been insisting for more than a week that he would find a way to add the controversial question to the census despite a Supreme Court decision in late June that appeared to block the move.
But an administration official said Thursday that the president now seemed unlikely to do that. Instead, Trump probably will take some form of executive action that may not involve altering the census, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official cautioned, however, that even within the White House staff, the final decision remained uncertain. Trump has a well documented propensity to offer surprises and change his mind.
Thursday, Trump announced he would hold an afternoon news conference in the Rose Garden.
As Trump prepared his action, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced that the chamber would vote next week to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for their refusal to turn over documents related to the administration's efforts to add the citizenship question to the census.
Whatever Trump does "will continue to be challenged in court," Pelosi said at her weekly news conference at the Capitol. "He'll try all kinds of things," she added, "in the meantime, we're printing the forms."
The issue has enormous importance to California and other states with large immigrant populations.
Experts have warned that adding a citizenship question is likely to cause many immigrants to not respond to the census at all, lowering population counts used to determine how federal grants are allocated and how many seats in Congress each state has.
The Supreme Court ruled two weeks ago, in a 5-4 decision, that the Trump administration's rationale for adding the question was contrived.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who cast the deciding vote in the case, left Trump a slim opening if his administration could quickly come up with a legally plausible reason for adding the question.
The timeline has made that process difficult. The administration had told courts that it needed to begin printing census forms by July 1, and the Commerce Department, which oversees the census, announced last week that it had begun printing the forms without the citizenship question, as Pelosi noted.
Trump has been reluctant to give up the fight _ an important one to his political base _ not only because it could help Republican states gain more influence but also because it touches on the immigration issue at the heart of Trump's reelection campaign.
Trump this week sent out a campaign email calling it "totally ridiculous that our Nation's government cannot ask a basic question of citizenship in our very EXPENSIVE, very important Census."
Trump's legal team had argued that a presidential directive laying out Trump's authority to add the citizenship question will speed the process through the courts, avoiding the bureaucracy of the Commerce Department.
But Justice Department lawyers had told the White House their proposals were unlikely to work. And Trump's shifting legal strategies have frustrated lower-court judges, who have demanded more consistent answers from administration lawyers caught off-guard by Trump's tweets.
Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced that the entire legal team working on the census issue would be swapped out for new lawyers _ an indication of the dissension the case has caused.
So far, however, two federal judges presiding over census-related cases have refused to allow the old lawyers to step aside.
